Balle Balle FIFA!

Once every Four years, there is a strange phenomenon that happens in our wonderful country.

Cobblers on the streetside stitch more torn and old footballs than they do shoes.

Sports stores replace all their Cricket paraphernalia with football stuff, and the colors of the storefront change the the Indian Blue to International Greens, Oranges, and Whites.

There is an insane number of requests that Wikipedia and ESPN receive from India with strange queries like 'who are popular players in Italy' and 'how many goals did Messi score'. Some honest folks even ask 'what is the difference between soccer and football' and 'why are Arsenal and Liverpool not playing the world cup'.

Profiles on Twitter sport new display pics, with weird 3 letter shields - like  GER, ARG, ITA, and USA. Yes, USA too - poor folks who probably recognize the acronym and take the known devil's route.

FIFA Time!

Considering that we live in a world where the image we project is much more important than the real personality we possess, this shouldn't come as a surprise! But usually sane folks also falling prey to the overload of tamasha is truly funny. Never have people studied so much on their phones and tabs. In an effort to appear knowledgeable, middle aged men all over the country have been reading up tomes on 'The Beautiful Game', and chanting the names in order to get them by heart. Folks have even been listening to commentary of old games, and learning how to pronounce the foreign names of popular players accurately. Yes, Villa is not read with an 'L', but is pronounced as 'Viyya'. Gyaan!

Red Eyed employees have been found walking into offices and crowding the coffee machines several times a day. The body demands sleep at 3 am, but in order to talk cool about the passes that Costa Rica sent, or the dismal refereeing, they keep themselves awake. Man, this world is tough on us.

Not just men! Women with changed DPs have been found talking football. And their social stature changes instantly! From boring, they become ultra-cool, hip, and suave, just like that! Worth all that preparation, surely. Those who were termed as geeks and nerds have suddenly become the center of conversations all over the country, and those sleepless nights are worth it. Afterall, its only another week or two that the Tamasha will be remembered, before we move on to something better!

There has been a manifold increase in the number of Twitter users in the country in this period. Never have people been so proficient at expressing themselves in under 140 characters! Photoshop artists have become demi-celebrities, by morphing images of RVP and Ochoa onto Indian situations, and have been receiving truckloads of followers and shares. Newspapers began the worldcup with half a page dedicated to it, and thanks to the unreal following that the game has been receiving, they've moved to two or even three full pages dedicated to the game! Folks that did not know that a channel called Sony Six existed, have added it to their favourites. Large screens across the country have been booked up, and hotels and pubs have bought an unprecedented number of giant TV screens to cater to the craziness.

All this for another two days. Tomorrow night the finals is done, and for a couple of more days, the topic will remain among the trends. Cricket, and our team's insult at the hands of Root and Andersen in the first test has already risen to the top of the trends, and we will hopefully go back to abusing our cricket heroes soon. Atleast we can speak knowledgeably about the sport and quote comparisons between aggressive Ganguly (remember the shirt waving?) and strange Dhoni (for not having bowled Binny). Then we can stop pretending and return to something we've lent our lives to long ago. Till the next worldcup, Cricket will rule! And Sunil Chhetri (look him up if you don't know about him, O Shameless Person!)'s stint in the commentator's box will be done :)

And Rediff can go back to finding some other Bollywood-centric Soft-Porn to peddle, since the semi-nude images of the 'Fan of the Day' will have to cease on Monday. But I'm certain they'll run a 'Best of FIFA Fans' slideshow on Tuesday before moving on!!

PS - I started this post over two weeks ago. But owing to staying up late to watch the football matches, I couldn't complete it before now ;)

Thrive - A tangential train of thought

Thrive is one of the most important documentaries to come out in this generation. While there are aspects to it that I don't entirely subscribe to, it is indeed thought altering; make no mistake about it. In case you haven't watched it yet, it'll take 132 mins, and here is the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEV5AFFcZ-s

While the video primarily concertrates on giving life to various conspiracy theories, what struck my intellect isn't those. Again, make no mistake - the expounded theories are all totally justified and accurate if you look at it from the producers point of view and take into consideration all the proofs that they share with us. The beauty of Thrive is that it is all immensely logical, and appeals to the section of our mind which loves logical thought flow. And it isn't helmed by a non-entity either! Foster Gamble is a direct heir of the Procter and Gamble empire, and when a man born into spectacular riches leaves his family's calling and spends 35 years on solving some of the world's primary questions, you can't but sit up and take notice.

But like the title of this post says, this is not directly about Thrive and its impact on our thinking. It is a tangential train of thought that stems from one core idea expressed in Thrive. As a part of the video's primary conspiracy - that of Global Dominance by a select few families, the video says one of the channels they use to achieve that is by training us to be dominated right from our birth. By putting similar seeds in all of our minds, and by controlling the education system all over the world, they try to prove that the system is creating robots out of us - those destined to be dominated and pose no threat to the power of the select few.

I don't totally endorse conspiracy theories, since I believe they're counter-productive, and are by default, detrimental to normal thought flow. But what cannot help but strike you is that the result of what we're doing to our people is exactly what they say in the video! Which is why this post is titled 'A Tangential train of thought'.

Lets replace the conspiracy theory of a few families trying to dominate the world, to a system which makes clones of ourselves. We created that system for convenience's sake, so that we wouldn't need to trouble our intellect in trying to understand a new set of thoughts and living with them as a part of our environment. In the movie The Stepford Wives, the men of the community decide they've had enough with free-thinking women, and create robots disguised as lovely wives, and all's well with their lives till Nicole Kidman comes and discovers their secret. In our world, we're so deeply entrenched in the system that we're doing exactly the same thing - albeit at a more dangerous level since we're not creating robots but making humans behave so. From the time a child is born, the society (or the system - they're the same!) starts thinking for it. By the time the child is old enough to think for itself, it is already groomed to think precisely like its predecessors. Like the latest Seagrams Ad puts it, before we realize it, 'we become our parents'. Or rather, we become the society, as our real parents are not just those two people who conceived us, but the society at large. Every thought that has been put in our minds, we pick up from the stream that is the society, and add our own attributes to it, thereby modifying the stream, and whipping up speed of the thought flow. The next person that comes along picks up that modified thought and does precisely the same. We are the system. We created it. We feed it. We are trapped in it.

The so-called radical thinkers of our world too, have a place in the stream, and they act as a counter-balance once in a while. But largely, they know what they're doing is a sham too. And no, we can't beat the system. It is too large, and just by wanting to beat it, we add to the confusion which is already prevalent, thereby strengthening the system itself. 

The only thing we can control is our own involvement in it. The way the system, or our society works, is through involvement. By either joining or rebelling, we add fuel to it. And once that thought gets into our brain, it won't let us stay in peace. We will want to change the system. And that is a myth! By wanting to change the system, we're making it more powerful - Yin and Yan. We pull, the system pulls back stronger. We try to change the system, the system puts more pressure on us to change. The way of the world. And that system is us.

But when we step back and just observe, there's nothing the society can do! It feeds off involvement. When we think about it, we give it energy. When we step back, we're aloof. There's no energy you pass to that system, and while that doesn't change the system, it changes it for us! We're at peace.

And that, precisely, is my take-off from Thrive. Yes, it is an important documentary. But for me, rather than the solutions expressed by The Thrive Movement, this is a much better option. By asserting our independence, we create a little island of sanity in an insane world, and while it may or may not impact the rest of the creation, it certainly is a balm for our troubled minds. There's a lot more to write on the topic, but the more I lecture on it, the more I will be trying to influence the thought flow. So I abstain :)